


Fake the Tell

by domesticadventures



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Demon Dean Winchester, Gen, M/M, Post-Episode: s09e23 Do You Believe In Miracles?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-08
Updated: 2014-09-08
Packaged: 2018-02-16 14:30:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2273301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/domesticadventures/pseuds/domesticadventures
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s a relief, actually, after so many months spent wondering what he was becoming. Now he has the blade in his hand, the mark on his arm, and he knows. He has torn skin and broken bones and his mouth tastes of blood and brimstone; it’s terrible, but it’s familiar. Nothing he can’t handle.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fake the Tell

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Hot Times" by Louden Swain.

At first, when Dean hears the voice urging him to open his eyes, he forgets where he is. He’s four years old again and his dad is shaking his shoulder gently because it’s time to get up, time to go to the hospital and meet his new baby brother. Excitement courses through his veins, forcing his eyes open.

His surroundings come into focus slowly, and it’s his room, all right, but not the one he was expecting. There’s someone next to him telling him to get up, too, but it’s not his father, just another man who helped make him into a monster.

His excitement dies immediately, but when he finally takes a brief survey of his current state, he notices he feels no pain, no rising panic, no downward spiral. His first coherent thought is simply, “Oh, okay.”

It’s a relief, actually, after so many months spent wondering what he was becoming. Now he has the blade in his hand, the mark on his arm, and he knows. He has torn skin and broken bones and his mouth tastes of blood and brimstone; it’s terrible, but it’s familiar. Nothing he can’t handle.

Crowley is smiling at Dean as he sits up, but the eagerness in the turn of his mouth is tempered by the uncertainty at the corners of his eyes. “Ready to go take a howl at that moon?” Crowley asks, and suddenly Dean is back at a country house surrounded by beehives, and Crowley is uncertain there, too, Crowley is unsettled and _afraid_.

In the present, though, Dean holds all the cards and Crowley is desperation standing at a crossroads, looking for a deal. Dean has been the latter more times than he cares to admit, but now he’s the house. He doesn’t have anything to lose, and Crowley has nothing to offer that Dean can’t take for himself.

“No,” Dean says, because it’s the truth. He doesn’t see the point in lying; not any more. “Get out.”

He allows Crowley three seconds of stunned silenced before he repeats himself like he means it. “I said, GET OUT!” he shouts, the room shaking with the force of it, and Crowley finally has the good sense to obey.

He wonders if Sam will be drawn by the noise, but no. Sam is in the basement, he knows, chanting a summoning spell laced with his own brand of desperation. Dean feels it tugging at him, nagging like buzzing in his ears, but he won’t let Sam see him like this. He won’t do that to his brother. All he wants is to get so far away that he can’t feel those words pulling him back, urging him to be selfish, to stay, to let everything he loves remain within his blast radius.

He’s pretty sure he could teleport out, if he wanted. He can feel the web of wards and enchantments around him and he knows, somehow, he just knows none of them are quite the right shape to stop him. He chooses to walk instead, making his way to the Impala and sliding inside. His own blood stains the seat, and he could probably remove it with a snap of his fingers, but he doesn’t. He just leaves it there as he turns the key and pulls out onto the road, heading away from the bunker, from his brother, from everything.

\--

Dean drives for days without stopping.

He knows, logically, that Sam must have given up the summoning spell by now. Sam still needs to sleep and eat and shit, so it’s not like he could have spent several days straight squatting on the dungeon floor chanting nonstop. Dean swears he can feel it anyway, though, something ringing in his ears, calling him back. But he won’t go. He _won’t_.

He wonders, idly, if the sensation would disappear given enough distance from the source. He imagines himself catching a plane to Europe, spending eternity in Paris or Rome or London. Then he imagines a crash landing in the middle of the Atlantic, an eternity spent inhaling saltwater. It’s irrational, he knows, just like it’s always been, but it’s enough to keep him happy with a little tinnitus.

He goes to the Grand Canyon instead. He looks out at it alone and pulls his phone from his pocket. When he turns it on, he has dozens of missed calls and texts from Sam. He deletes the messages without reading them.

Dean types out a single text message of his own: _Don’t follow me_. He hits send, then throws his phone overhand in a wide arc, watches it disappear over the edge.

His chest aches and his eyes burn as he walks away. He tells himself it’s probably because there’s salt in the air and tries not to think of home.

“The car is your home,” he says out loud, stubbornly. The words taste like smoke on his tongue.

\--

He sees an angel at a gas station, once. He turns from grabbing a bag of chips just in time to catch them coming out of some back room, glowing like a lifetime’s worth of neon signs. All that glory condensed down into a human-sized package, he can’t even see the vessel beneath.

“You gonna smite me or something?” he asks. He aims for cocky, but it’s undermined by the fact he has to squint just to be able to bear looking at them. He grinds his teeth, refusing to tear his eyes away as he waits for an answer.

“No,” they say simply, offering no further explanation, no justification for this unsolicited mercy. He’s struck by the sense they’re averting their gaze; it’s a surreal experience, like being ignored by the sun. He wonders what kind of monster it takes to make even some asshole angel look away.

“Are you going to pay for that?” they ask, in two voices at once, true and borrowed mixing together, making it impossible to tell friend from foe.

“Sure thing, Gandalf,” he says, laying a five on the counter, pulling his hand back before they can reach out to take the money. “Keep the change.”

He walks to the Impala slowly, deliberately, as the angel searches for the right brand of cigarettes for the next customer in line. Dean waits for his eyes to catch fire, for his ears to bleed, for the angel to call to him, to command him, to _stop_ him.

“That will be twelve ninety-seven,” they say instead. Dean gets in the car.

He eats the chips on the road, letting crumbs fall into his lap, wiping his fingers on his jeans. They burn going down.

\--

He answers their calls for no reason other than because he can. He realizes it’s below his pay grade, but there’s something comforting about feeling he’s doing the dirty work.

Most of them are people who don’t really understand what it is they’re selling, people for whom mortality is little more than a thought exercise, an abstract idea that doesn’t stand a chance against palpable notions of wealth or fame or talent. He turns them down without explanation, ignoring their melodramatic screaming, their indignant disappointment. It’s not his job to convince people what their lives are worth.

Some of them, though. Some of them are brutally, unfairly aware of death’s proximity, even if they’ve never seen his reapers.

He’ll never forget the call he answers one cruelly lovely afternoon, the one that changes the game entirely. He knows the direction the deal is going long before the woman standing at the crossroads makes her request, sees it in the slump of her shoulders and the set of her jaw and the circles under her eyes. She can’t be much older than he was that first time he watched his brother die.

When she offers her soul for her sister, he doesn’t tell her no. Instead, he tells her the truth.

“I sold my soul for the brother I grew up protecting above all else and all I got was a year,” he says. There’s the faintest spark of curiosity in her eyes. It makes her look almost alive.

“Is that how you wound up here?” she asks.

“No,” he says, but if he’s being honest, he’s not quite sure that’s correct. He hesitates. “Sort of.”

“And? Was it worth it?”

He laughs at that, short and sharp, catching them both by surprise. The woman shifts uncomfortably, frowning. “Was it worth it?” he asks himself. He remembers spending every second of every minute of every hour of those 365 days telling himself it was. But the moment he remembers best is the last one, that very last one where his heart was still beating and his brain was still working, when he could feel claws like hooks in his chest and breath like hellfire in his face. He remembers the horrible, traitorous thought that crossed his mind in that final moment of exquisite agony, that single second in which he wished, fervently, unforgivably, that they could trade.

That’s the thought he carried with him as the hounds sunk their fangs into his soul and dragged him down to hell; that’s the guilt he lived with for the four months that felt like forty years. That’s something he’s never forgotten, and it’s not fair to him, and it’s not fair to Sam, and neither of them deserved it. But it set the tone for their relationship, and now his brother calls for him in vain while he walks around carrying the mark on his arm like a brand, a physical representation of every bad decision he’s ever made.

The woman inhales sharply, but it’s only when he sees her shocked expression that he realizes he’s been thinking out loud. He looks at the ground, suddenly embarrassed, but he has a job to do.

“I know you want your sister to live,” he says, “but do you want to die? Because really, _that’s_ what you’re asking for.” He’s nearly shouting, now; not pleading, but practically willing her to understand. _Why?_ he wonders. He doesn’t even know this girl. Why should he care? “Do you understand that’s what you’re saying, that you think you deserve to live less than your sister does? Because I don’t believe that for a second.”

In the tense silence that follows, he tries to imagine someone saying these things to him, making him believe them. But when he thinks about that scenario, he can’t put a face to the words, not Sam’s or John’s or Bobby’s; not even his own. How stupid does he have to be, to think he could convince this stranger of something he can’t even properly lie about to himself? Any second now, she’s going to call him on his bluff, going to cry and scream and demand and--

“Okay,” she says, softly, and there’s bitterness in it, but also resignation. Relief. She bursts into tears, then, and he just watches her cry, stands frozen in place as she lets herself grieve.

“What now?” she asks eventually, composing herself. “Are you going to offer me some bullshit cliche, some line about how everything is going to be okay?” Aha. That’s more like what he was expecting.

“No,” he says, “it’s not going to be okay. It’s going to hurt like hell, figuratively. But it’s going to get slightly more bearable eventually. Unlike hell, literally.”

She looks miserable, standing with her arms crossed, her eyes red, but she’s nodding. Better than he was expecting.

“Get outta here,” he says. “Go live a life your sister would be proud of.”

He watches her walk away, and for the first time, he wonders if maybe all those things he did, all those choices he made, weren’t just him being weak and selfish and shitty. Maybe they were just him being human.

\--

From then on, he tells this story to everyone whose summons he answers. He decides that if anyone still wants to deal after he finishes, he’s going to go ahead and deal. No one seems to want to once they’ve heard his spiel, though. He doesn’t even have to exaggerate.

One day, though. One day he shows up at a crossroads and there’s a guy there, maybe about his own age, who insists he’s going to change the world. He even has the balls to demand twenty years.

“I have a head start on my own merit,” the guy says, “but politics moves way too slowly for ten to be enough.”

"Tell me about it," Dean says, and the way the guy laughs, he's taken it as a joke about the government. Dean is serious, though, and he says as much.

“What,” the guy asks, “you want to hear my whole campaign plan or something?”

Dean shrugs. “I’ve got all the time in the world.” The guy rolls his eyes, but he spends the next hour telling Dean all about his vision for change, his grand plan for equality, for justice, for peace. For a world that’s different, that’s _better_.

In exchange, Dean tells the guy about hell, promises him all he’ll receive for his twenty years of service to others is an eternity of personal suffering. “Still interested?” he asks, after.

The guy doesn’t even bat an eye. “The good of the many outweighs the good of the few." He says it with such conviction that for a second Dean is almost the beneficiary of second-hand belief, but he's been one of the few far too many times to really believe such a sweeping generalization.

Dean admires that, though, that pure idealism, that unshakeable faith. “Deal,” he says.

When they seal it with a kiss, Dean realizes maybe he’s been lying to himself about more than he thought.

\--

Cas finds him outside some nothing of a town a few weeks later, stopped on the side of the road, waiting for the sunrise.

“Hello, Dean,” Cas says softly, and promptly leans on the hood next to Dean, way up in his personal space like he still belongs there. They stand in silence, waiting for light to break over the horizon, filter across the landscape.

“I thought I said not to follow me,” Dean says, staring into the distance.

“Technically, you told _Sam_ not to follow you,” Cas says. Dean can hear the smile in his voice and resists the urge to turn, to catch a glimpse of it in his peripheral vision.

“How’d you find me?” he asks instead. “Your friend at the gas station?”

“As far as I know, Nora is not aware of your present location.” Cas deadpans it so well that Dean can’t resist turning this time. When he sees a smile tugging at the corner of Cas’ mouth, he rolls his eyes, but he’s fighting a grin in spite of himself. Cas taps his knuckles gently on the Impala. “You didn’t change the license plates,” he says.

“Oh,” Dean says, stupidly, and it occurs to him that maybe he hasn’t been running away quite as hard as he thought. He shifts uncomfortably, itching with the sudden desire to change the subject. “Well, you found me. What do you think?” he asks, throwing his arms wide.

Cas frowns. “What do I think about what?” Dean would think he was joking, except that Cas is squinting at him like there’s some subtle change he’s supposed to discern, something other than the glaringly obvious.

“C’mon, Cas,” he says. “I know how bad I must look now. Met an angel a few weeks back who could barely stand the sight of me.”

“You look like Dean Winchester to me,” Cas says, staring at him with an intensity that’s become so familiar, and that’s when it hits him.

Nothing about Cas should be familiar. It should hurt just to look at him, to be this close to him. But instead, Cas just looks like _Cas_ , same as always. His mind reels with the implications, with the understanding he’s missed something important while he’s been running away.

“I’m an idiot,” Dean says, swallowing around the lump in his throat.

Cas’ frown deepens as he reaches out to place a hand on Dean’s arm. “Dean?” he says. It comes out a question, an invitation for discussion, for understanding, even now. Suddenly Dean can’t stand it, this kindness that’s far more than he deserves.

“What do you want from me?” Dean demands, jerking out of Cas’ grip, angry for a reason he doesn’t understand.

He wants Cas to be angry, too, wants his rage and his hate so he has a reason to keep running, but Cas has never been one to indulge Dean’s self-loathing. He just looks confused. Concerned. “I don’t understand. What do you--”

Dean interrupts by shoving Cas back against the hood of the Impala with his body, pinning Cas’ arms above his head as he grinds his hips against Cas’. “Is this what you want?” Dean asks, trying to ignore the pervasive ache that screams at him to stop, begs him to continue.

Cas’ breath hitches, but he manages to level his gaze at Dean. When he speaks, his voice is steady, sure. “I want _you_. We can fix this.”

Dean has an easy out, now, so he takes it. When he disappears, it definitely isn’t with a flutter of wings.

\--

Dean spends three very, very long days trying to convince himself he’ll be fine on his own, and when he thinks he’s got it down, he returns to his car.

He’s not exactly sure what he was expecting, but when he finds Cas sprawled across the front seat of the Impala, fast asleep, it all unravels. He’s so relieved he wants to cry. Cas stirs slightly when Dean opens the door.

“Hey,” he says, kneeing Cas in the head as gently as he can manage. “Scoot over.”

Dean slides into the driver’s seat, keeps his hands on his knees and his gaze out the windshield as Cas works his way towards consciousness.

“When you died,” Dean says, when Cas is near enough to awake that he can’t bear waiting any more. He swallows hard, not sure, even now, he can say what he needs to say. But he can feel Cas’ eyes on him, now, compelling him to continue. “When you died this last time. I, uh. I held your face in my hands and my voice broke like I was still a goddamn teenager.”

Dean’s whole body feels like it’s on fire. He knows it must be a trick of his mind, a symptom of his inability to sever his last ties to humanity, just like his desire to take a steadying breath. He feels ridiculous. “I’m just starting to realize what that means. If I change back, am I going to forget that? Am I going to lose this clarity? I’m scared, Cas,” he says, and hates that his voice breaks on that, too.

Dean sits with his hands clenched and dreads what’s coming next.

There’s a huff of laughter from next to him, and he has about half a second in which to be affronted before Cas says, “You idiot” and pulls him into a kiss.

Cas tastes like molecules and stardust, like stale coffee and Dean’s toothpaste, terrifying and familiar all at once.

“I’ll make sure you remember,” Cas says, like it’s just that simple.

Dean doesn’t let himself believe it’s actually going to be simple, but he does let himself believe. “Okay,” he says. “Okay.”

Dean turns the key and starts them on the long drive towards home.


End file.
